A Crescendo of Fakery

One of the great virtues of capitalism is that people can buy what they want and get what they deserve. When amateur investors want to buy tech stocks, Wall Street finds new tech tech to sell them.

Monday, August 5, 2024 

Bill Bonner, writing today from Poitou, France 

It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. 

—Gore Vidal 

“The nice thing about living overseas,” said an American who came to visit yesterday, “is that I don’t have to read the US news.” 

Among the idiotic reports he’s missing is this from today’s Markets Insider: 

The markets went berserk on Friday 

The US stock market plunged into chaos on Friday as investors digested a streak of negative economic data and disappointing earnings from mega cap tech companies.  

All three major US indexes closed more than 1.5% lower, with tech and small-caps taking the biggest hit. The Dow Jones industrial average was down almost 1,000 points at intraday lows. The moves continued a marketwide skid that started on Thursday. The S&P 500 ended up sliding 3% in just two days, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is down nearly 5% over the period, and now sits in correction territory. 

Of course, the markets didn’t go ‘berserk’ on Friday. The Dow barely dropped below 40,000... leaving it still near the top of its range. 

Besides, investors weren’t going ‘berserk’ anyway; they were coming to their senses. Stocks always move from high to low and back. Sometimes, they go crazy. That’s what happened in 1999, for example. The tech darlings just kept going up. Many people were convinced that it was a New Era... made possible by the stunning new technology: the Internet.  

‘Investors’ poured into Wall Street hoping to get rich. They read the news. They had heard about the New Era of prosperity, led by companies such as Webvan and Boo.com. These companies were going ‘to the moon.’ Everybody wanted to go along with them.  

One of the great virtues of capitalism is that people can buy what they want... and get what they deserve. And when amateur investors want to buy tech stocks, Wall Street quickly finds some new tech to sell them. There was Spiral Frog, for example, and Flooz. 

But then, on March 10, 2000, the Nasdaq peaked at more than 5,000... and the bubble popped. The amount of money flowing into new deals dropped from over $120 billion in 2000 to under $20 billion in 2002. The Nasdaq itself fell back to nearly 1,000... and didn’t return to its previous high until 15 years later. Overall, stocks lost $5 trillion in value. 

Lesson: buying low and selling high works; buying high and selling low doesn’t. 

What makes the news both infuriating and entertaining is that it is mostly fake — like a science fiction novel that sounds all-too-real. And it supports a whole fake world... much of which we’ve been describing in these daily commentaries. 

Debt Reckoning

We’ve seen that stock prices... and much of the success of the US economy... are fake. They were purchased on credit, with fake money. And now the US faces a $100 trillion — private and public — debt reckoning. One way or another that bill will have to be paid. Then, when the transaction is finally complete, we will see how wealthy we really are. 

That story — how the US climbs down from its debt mountain — is the one to watch for the next ten years or so. Our high-confidence guess is that there will be a lot of sore feet and banged up knees along the way.  

But this is an election year, and most of the fake news is fake political news. We’ve seen that our beloved democracy is largely fake. The bigger the scale, the bigger the fraud. ‘The People’ do not really control the US government. Instead, the insiders are in the driver’s seat. And they go where they want to go, not where the people want to go. 

And much of the fake political news today concerns their fake candidate... Kamala Harris... who now dominates the fake news cycle.  

‘Kamala is a failed candidate,’ says one headline. 

‘Kamala is unfit and unqualified,’ says another. 

Kamala this. Kamala that.  

Kamala’s only real qualification for the top job is that she is neither male, nor white... and most important... she is not Trump.  

And now, voters will be able to select the candidate they want... and get the president they deserve. According to the latest news, this woman, Kamala... chosen for us by party insiders... is in the lead. Newsweek: 

Harris now leads Donald Trump in eight national polls 

RMG Research is the latest pollster to find Harris leading Trump in the national popular vote. The firm released a survey on Friday showing her with a 5-point lead (47 percent to 42 percent) over the former president. The poll was conducted among 3,000 registered voters from July 29 to July 31. 

So, it all comes together in a crescendo of fakery.  

Fake money. Fake interest rates. Fake conservatives. Fake liberals. Fake democracy.  

And a fake president! 

Stay tuned. 

Regards, 

Bill Bonner 

Some readers reported difficulty accessing a link posted in yesterday’s essay from our colleague Joe Withrow. To register for the event Joe is hosting for new readers, please go here.

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